Tony Horton Of P90X: Fitness Interview

The New Training Program From P90X Is Coming

tony horton on muscle confusion

"If you go up and down a ladder a bunch of times, you’ll get some exercise from that, but if you climb a rock wall, you’re gonna get a lot more. The nuances in muscle confusion [is that] it’s multidimensional. In P90X there’s a strong emphasis on flexibility, there’s a strong emphasis on resistance exercises, there’s a strong emphasis on core, there’s a strong emphasis on cardiovascular strength, there’s plyometrics in there for fast-twitch work. The idea is to work on your strengths and weaknesses, and that’s what muscle confusion does. Muscle confusion is a plateau-buster because you’re constantly challenging different aspects of your fitness."

on recovery during P90X

"Great fitness comes from a smart strategy and the proper recovery time. It’s about stress management and getting enough sleep. People don’t talk about that because it’s not as exciting as muscle confusion, but it’s as important as proper diet and variety in exercise. Sometimes you have to do nothing so that you can do something."

on the key to P90X

"With P90X we made sure that we created a product for a society that is extremely overweight, so that’s really the key. The key is to try to give everybody the opportunity to get fit and healthy. But we all have different starting points and that’s why there are so many modifications in P90X."

on preparing for P90X

"There are really two different groups of people who come and ask me that question, and I say that you have to figure out which of these you are:

If you’re not athletic with a bunch of weight to lose and you jump into P90X, plan on having a really hard time for the first 45 to 60 days, where you’re not going to be able to do maybe half the routines, half of the exercises. But while everybody else is doing pull-ups and you’re toast, you’re marching in place and you come back another day and do an extra pull-up, an extra push-up. You have to modify the hell out of the program, but each time you come back, you might be able to do a rep or two more because you’re focused, you’re consistent, you’re eating right, [and] the weight’s coming off.

For other people, I say go get P90; the workouts are half as long, they’re half as intense, but it’s still working, it’s still six days a week and it’s still a diet program."

on why people fail or succeed

"I think people fail because their reasons for doing it aren’t very good. Usually we get caught up in the desire to look differently in the future, but you have no idea how you’re going to look in the future. It all becomes about ego and aesthetics. Typically that’s the reason why everybody buys into theses short-term products that help them lose weight. P90X is not a weight-loss product; people will lose weight, but it’s a health and fitness product, it’s a lifestyle-shifting program.

The people who succeed are the ones that go: “I want a new life; I want to feel good; I want to be healthier; I want to be fitter; I want to do things that’ll make me less vulnerable to being hurt and getting sick.”

If your priorities are in order and your reasons why are based more on being a better person as opposed to looking good in front of people who could care less, that’s huge and that’s really the difference between the two."